Description

Japan`s global claim to Asia during the years 1900-1945 entailed propaganda and intelligence activities among the Muslim populations in Asia as a strategy to help imperial interests in an effort to become a world power. The Japanese authorities engendered an “islam policy, or, kaikyo seisaku” A little known aspect of twentieth century history, Japanese involvement in Islam Policy during 1900-1945 offers insight into the historical background of world power relations with political Islam. The subject shows that global historical perspectives have to be sensitized to regional interconnectedness in terms of historical processes, yet not loose sight of how events on the transnational also interplayed with the political reality of nationalism and imperial power in the modern twentieth century. What the late Joseph Fletcher of Harvard termed interconnected history is apt as a starting point to practice a global history perspective that sees connections and filtrations between region which escape attention at the national scale. This paper argues that the transnational social, economic, and communal networks between China and the Near East/West Asia “interlaced” with the national/political agendas of the twentieth century. Chinese Coins from global trade in the East Mediterranean, the Asian Muslim transnational network for pilgrimage to Mecca/Medina, and Japanese archival evidence point to the geography of Japanese Asianist agendas and policies from the late 19th century to the end of the Second World War in the 20th century.

Selçuk Esenbel is professor of history in the Department of History, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. She is also in charge of East Asian Studies there, including the Japanese and Chinese language programs. Her publications include Even the Gods Rebel: Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising (1998); “The People of Tokugawa Japan: The State of the Field in Early Modern Social/Economic History,” Early Modern Japan (Spring 2002); and The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on Japanese Turkish Relations (2003), with Inaba Chiharu.